Rope physics is killing the framerate in Crysis 3

The Crysis series of games has always been held up as a benchmark for whether you have a great gaming rig or not. And when a new piece of performance kit appears on the market, the question “will it run Crysis?” inevitably gets asked on a comment thread somewhere on the Internet.

Crysis 3 has only just been released and you only need a dual-core 2.4GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a Radeon HD5770 to run it, but the game prefers a Core i7 and 8GB RAM if you have it available. But even if you have the latest and greatest hardware inside your gaming PC, the first level of the Crysis 3 is noticeably slow to the point where it can half the frame rate.

If the entire game was chugging then it would be obvious Crytek needed to do some work and optimize it, but it’s just the first level, and in an area which is more corridor navigation than large open spaces. It’s an area that should offer up no problems even for mid-range hardware.

So why does the framerate suffer so much? Modder MaLDo has figured it out, and it’s all to do with rope physics.

In the first level there are a number of ropes hanging down with cargo attached to them. As long as these ropes are not interacted with, performance should remain around 60fps depending on your hardware. But if you shoot them, they start swaying in the wind, or get knocked, the framerate of the game drops, with MaLDo reporting a smooth 60fps dropping to 32fps in some cases.

It seems Crytek has some optimizations to do regarding the resources allocated by the game for calculating rope physics. As soon as they do, that first level should fly along. And the good news is, it should be a relatively easy fix to implement.